Victoria Sambunaris: Transforming the American Landscape places one of the most sustained photographic projects of the past quarter-century in a broader national frame. On view from June 26, 2026 through February 21, 2027, the exhibition gathers large-format photographs made across the United States by Victoria Sambunaris, whose work tracks the land as it has been altered by industry, infrastructure and the claims made in the name of progress.
Sambunaris has spent more than 25 years moving through rail yards, quarries, refineries, highways and open terrain, making pictures that treat the American landscape as something constructed rather than given. Her photographs are visually precise, but they resist easy nostalgia. Mountains, desert edges and suburban fringes appear alongside pipelines, storage tanks, power lines and other markers of human occupation, creating scenes where beauty and disturbance sit in the same frame.
That tension gives the exhibition its force. The land in Sambunaris’s work is not a wilderness untouched by history. It is a contested surface shaped by extraction, migration, transport and settlement. Her pictures register that complexity without turning didactic. They remain rooted in the formal discipline of large-format photography, with a clear attention to scale, distance and horizon, even as they ask harder questions about what Americans have done to the places they call home.
The timing is pointed. As the country marks its 250th anniversary, Sambunaris’s work offers a less celebratory reading of the national landscape. Her photographs look past the familiar symbols of promise and expansion and toward the physical consequences of those ideas. In her own terms, she records “anonymous modern-day monuments” that have settled across the country, quietly reshaping geography and memory alike.
The result is a body of work that is both documentary and reflective. Transforming the American Landscape presents the United States as Sambunaris sees it: expansive, altered and full of contradictions that remain visible in the ground itself.
Image: Untitled (Housing Development), Draper, Utah 2017, Chromogenic print, 39 x 55 in. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery.
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